in his day as it is in ours, for many years after his death, and even to-day, the natural order of growing control is violated in some infant schools all over the world. Yes, one may even yet find places where little children are forced to try to get control of their fingers in writing small letters long before they have real control of the larger arm and elbow muscles. Reform is slow, not because people have never heard of new methods, but because they do not know the meaning of them. For example: when the exercise, known as "arm-drawing," began to be advocated, there was an extraordinary amount of misunderstanding about the real meaning of it. It was believed to be a new and spurious kind of art! It was believed to be a trick—a fad—and also an entirely "new" order of exercise, never attempted before! Only after years did people begin to see that it was no more a new kind of art than is skipping, no more a new order of exercise than is walking or crawling, that its uses are physiological and that one may, and as a rule must, quickly pass beyond the need for it as the power of control becomes finer and more delicate.
Yet Séguin had gone far to demonstrate all this in his school thirty years ago, and to expound it in his books, L'Idiotie and L'Enfant Normal and Abnormal.
